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Spot the Difference?

Yesterday’s emergency session at Parliament to discuss the recent rioting in Britain showed in everyway why politicians are so out of touch with the people who they say have elected them.

Here were by and large a collection of people born into privelage who were pontificating on the disgrace of what had been perpretrated by those born into nothing.

David Cameron will never know what it is like to struggle to buy a pencil, nor his opposite number the increasingly unconvincing leader of the Labour Party, Ed Milliband.

That is not a criticism, it’s a simple statement of fact.

There was a widespread agreement throughout the House – similar to the one that was present during that ‘debate’ over whether this country should go to war in iraq – the kind that is unhealthy for a democracy especially now when her poorest citizens so clearly need leadership and some understanding.

There have been disgraceful scenes and episodes that is clear, but by and large this country witnessed what the police service that are on the frontline have long known, that our most vulnerable children are finding it impossible to progress in a healthy way in a society where no one talks or acknowledges each other, and where everyone is suspicious of anyone.

If politicians and politics are ever going to mean anything to anyone, then those who say we elected them need to have lived, they need to have been through some of the experiences that have clearly scarred the lives of some of those who took to the streets with such venom.

Any talk of a broken society is little more than PR spin thought up in an advertising boardroom to make a deeply unpopular party a little less unpopular and nothing more.

As the voters showed no one was fooled by it then, any more than they are now.